Phase mapping of acoustic sources by beamforming and iterative far field monopole substitution

The first aim of this paper is to give emphasis to the importance of assessing phase information when reconstructing and mapping a sound field. In fact, in acoustic analysis phase distribution is frequently simply either not considered or ignored, even though it can supply very useful information for the understanding of the mapping itself or for further analyses. In this paper a procedure to carry out phase mapping of acoustic sources in beamforming measurement is illustrated. The second aim of this paper is to propose a straightforward iterative optimization algorithm based on the monopole substitution starting from beamforming results. It allows for the reconstruction of sound field without the use of any matrix inversion. Both numerical and experimental validations of the method are presented. Results shown hereafter prove the effectiveness of the approach.